The News From Gothenburg

Gothenburg - or Göteborg, as it is known to the Swedes - is an attractive city on the west coast of Sweden on the Kattegat. Up until the 1980s it was relatively ethnically homogeneous, inhabited mainly by “persons of Swedish background”. However, like so many other major Swedish cities, it now hosts a large immigrant population, mostly Muslims.

Earlier this month immigrant youths in Gothenburg staged “Ramadan riots“, a celebration of vandalism and violence which has become an annual ritual in some of the larger cities of Western Europe. The “youths” get to burn cars, break windows, and loot, and the European press, in full PC denial, gets to ignore them.

On a different topic, the October 25th edition of the Swedish newspaper GT posted an article about the unprecedented number of rapes reported in Gothenburg (for reader XY’s full translation of the article, go here):
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The number of reported rapes is higher than ever in Gothenburg. Right now there are so many cases that the police lack time to investigate them all — though at the same time more cases lead to prosecution.

“We are forced to set tough priorities,” says Christina Lycke-Alhbin, assistant manager of the investigation department.

Never before have the police in Gothenburg had this many ongoing rape investigations. They are now working with about 60 reports where the perpetrator is known. There are in addition a large number of cases with an unknown perpetrator.

“There is an increase, that’s easily observed,” says Christina Lycke-Alhbin.

Since the Swedish press is still fully PC, there is no mention of the religion or ethnicity of the rapists, and the collection of such statistics is in any case officially forbidden by the authorities. But, as Fjordman has frequently reported, there is plenty of evidence that immigrant youths are overwhelmingly responsible for the recent increase in the incidence of rape.

The GT article goes on to assert that the rape increase in Gothenburg “is caused by more people reporting assaults and because the law has changed to classify more crimes as rape.” This has become the standard line from the Swedish authorities when discussing the rape crisis. But, as Fjordman’s report on Sweden’s rape epidemic has shown, this argument doesn’t hold water:

The number of rape charges in Sweden has quadrupled in just above twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six times as common today as they were a generation ago. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm, who has investigated violent crimes in one court, found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents.

The official explanation given by Swedish authorities to this increase is that much of it is a “technical” increase due to the fact that more victims of rape now report this crime to the police. There is not a hint of evidence for this explanation. On the contrary, intimidation of people reporting any kind of crime to the police has rapidly worsened in Sweden during the same time period.

When the “youths” of Gothenburg aren’t out rioting and raping, they’re probably down at the Bellevue Mosque listening to an incendiary sermon from one of the resident radical imams. According to this translation of an OSC Report from October 19th,

The Islamic Sunni Center in Gothenburg, which runs the Bellevue Mosque, has become a center for extremism in western Sweden , according to media reports. The Swedish terrorism suspect on trial in Sarajevo, Mirsad Bektasevic, attended the mosque, as did the recently arrested Abu Usama El-Swede , described by the press as Bektasevic’s “mentor”. Two extremist youth groups are also associated with the mosque. The spokesman for one of the groups and El-Swede are very active on the Internet.

One of the prominent hotheads at the Bellevue Mosque is a Swedish convert to Islam who has taken on the nom de guerre “Abu Usama El-Swede”:

Bellevue as Extremist Hub . . . The tabloid daily Aftonbladet reported that Bektasevic’s mentor at the mosque was a Swedish convert to Islam, known by his online name Abu Usama El-Swede, who was arrested by the Swedish and British police in May 2006. The British police reportedly asked the Swedes to apprehend him after they came across his name among the contacts of a British suspect in custody. Authorities believed that El-Swede was also connected with Abu Hamza in the UK. He was released after interrogation, but was told he remained a suspect under investigation (30 May 2006).

Born Ralf Wadman, El-Swede changed his name to Abdu Raouf when he converted to Islam during his first prison term in 1998, following a history of petty crime and involvement in neo-Nazi groups. After the release, he moved to Morocco, where he married his first wife. Upon returning to Sweden, he divorced and became involved in narcotics. In 2003 he was arrested while smuggling the African drug khat from Denmark to Sweden. Before he could serve his sentence, he was arrested again for threatening a policeman. During the second prison term, he reassumed his Swedish last name (Metro, 31 May 2006).

According to Aftonbladet, El-Swede is a prolific contributor to Muslim chatrooms, where he has urged readers to “destroy Islam’s enemies and put fear into the hearts of the scum.” He has also issued threats against a Swedish evangelist preacher who last year called Muhammad a “pedophile” The same paper reported that in 2004 El-Swede maintained contact with a well-known neo-Nazi via one of his websites, and that the two discussed “taking up arms” and “storming” the Swedish Prime Minister’s office (19 November 2006, 27 January 2006).

Fjordman reported last year that Abu Usama El-Swede and his associates have called for terrorist attacks on the police and Swedish authorities.

I went looking for Abu Usama El-Swede’s postings on English-language Islamic forums, and found that some of them are now nearly blank, with a note that they are “edited”. His remaining entries are innocuous: evidently Abu Usama El-Swede decided that it would be prudent to remove some of his more incendiary writings from publicly-available sources.

According to the OSC report, another firebrand at the Bellevue Mosque is Abu Malik:

Speakers Espousing Fundamentalist Views — A frequent speaker at the Bellevue Mosque and Tuff [an extremist youth group] meetings is Anas Khalifa, who is widely quoted as espousing Salafi views in the media, and is a frequent contributor to Muslim chatrooms in Sweden. Khalifa, who uses the name Abu Malik on the Internet, also runs several extremist websites.

• Sydsvenska Dagbladet described Khalifa as a charismatic speaker who appeals to youth because he is young and speaks their language (“immigrant Swedish”). He was a petty criminal before turning to Islam. He also lectures for the fundamentalist Islamic Cultural Association in Malmö (9 February 2006).
  
• Khalifa preaches segregation of the Muslim community, claiming Muslims “cannot be friends with Christians or Jews” and “must not mix with them” because then “you become like them” (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 9 February 2006; Swedish Television, 25 April 2006).

It’s not clear from the report whether Abu Malik is another “person of Swedish background” who has converted to Islam.

Muslims like Abu Usama El-Swede are particularly attractive as recruits to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups for infiltration into the United States. Have El-Swede shave off his beard and put on normal Western clothes, get him a fake passport with a Swedish name, and he could easily pass for any other Swedish tourist.

How many blond blue-eyed converts to Islam are there in Sweden? I have been unable to find any estimates of such statistics — perhaps some of our Scandinavian readers have information that they can leave in the comments…


Hat tip for the OSC report: reader LN.